Jean-Paul Kelly: That ends that matter

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Jean-Paul Kelly, "That ends that matter," 2016

still from three-channel video installation.

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24; 7 pm 

Artist Talk by Jean-Paul Kelly: Tuesday, January 22; 7 pm

Video Screening curated by Jean-Paul Kelly on Thursday, March 7, 2019; 7 pm

Curatorial Tour by Jenifer Papararo: Saturday, March 9, 2019 | 3pm

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Jean-Paul Kelly to Plug In ICA for his solo-exhibition That ends that matter, a comprehensive video installation set in a courtroom. Part re-enactment combined with found-photo montage streams, and graphical animation, That ends that matter attempts to parse through and recite Kelly’s experiences observing hearings at the City of London Magistrates’ Court in Central London, UK. Given the UK’s regulations restricting all forms of visual or audio recording in courtrooms, any recollection of events throughout a hearing becomes subjective. In an effort to recount what the artist, referencing documentarian Fredrick Wiseman, calls a “fair account” of what he witnessed, there’s an embrace of abstraction, tangents, error, and the aestheticization of Kelly’s felt experiences.

Based in Toronto, Kelly has over the last decade and a half, been closely working within a practice rooted in dissecting documentary frameworks. In an earlier interview for Vdrome.org, Kelly references the writer Truman Capote’s work as “poetic reporting” a process that Kelly embraces. Kelly states, “I’m interested in the metaphors and possibilities of documentary substance.”

This is the first presentation of Jean-Paul Kelly’s work in Winnipeg and in the prairies. He has extensively exhibited and screened works across North America and Europe including The Power Plant, Toronto; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto; SBC Gallery, Montreal; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Nightingale Cinema, Chicago; Courtesan Festival, Ghent; International Film Festival, Rotterdam; The New York Film Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival and Delfina Foundation, London UK. In 2014, he was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. He’s been longlisted the Sobey Art Award and the AIMIA|AGO Photography Prize.